Episode 8,947 in my series “Trying to Decipher Stuff I Found on The Interwebs” Have you come across this meme before?
The idea is, the murderer can’t find his prey so he starts singing a line of a song everyone that nobody can resist finishing, and it forces the victim to reveal his hiding place. I’ve seen a few incarnations of it but this was the first time I’d seen a Portuguese version so I thought I’d try and work out what the song was.
What makes it difficult is I think there’s a typo. It should say “Oliver Benji” but I guess someone’s spellcheck changed Benji to Beiji. The rest of the line “são os magos da bola” means “are wizards of the ball”. It’s a reference to a Japanese Anime series called Captain Tsubasa which was shown in Portugal under the name “Campeões – Oliver e Benji” from 1983 to 86. It must have been popular at the time, because if you dig around on Google you can find sticker albums of it and everything. I guess if you are a certain age the nostalgia must run deep.
Luso 